How to start a Shopify store from scratch and make sure it doesn't fail

Let's go over some strategies that will help you get the most out of your Shopify store.

This post is aimed at those who are just getting started with Shopify.

Let's start with the bad news most ecommerce sites fail within the first 120 days. Now that seems bad, but you have control of how your Shop performs.

It all stars around the product or products you would like to sell through your store. This is the most crucial stage of planning a store.

I suggest that you try the sprocket platform to find products you can drop ship. Check out this link 
https://spocket.grsm.io/digitalgigger

Sprocet has thousands of products to you pick from. You can get started for free without a credit card.

The product is how you will be making money from your store. You want to ensure that you have done as much market research as possible.

You want know who to target your products too, and who is your competition.

Once you have settled on a product you believe fits a niche it's time to set up a store around that product.

I like to create a brand around the product by getting a domain that reflects the type of product I am selling and by getting a logo that fits the branding I am going for.

Once I the store is set up in Shopify I add the logo and make changes to the the presets. You can change the colors to match your logo and also match the type of product you are selling. There are different templates that you can use or you can even pay a pro to customize your store.

With Shopify this next tip is crucial.

Make sure your store scales well to mobile since a large chunk of business going to come from people on smartphones. Test it out before you go live ensure everything is working and scales properly.

You also want to make sure you provide as much information as possible about your store. That you provide an about us page and a way for customer to contact you.

Building trust is a crucial piece of the puzzle. So make sure people view your site as professional and trust worthy.

So boom your store is all set up you have a great product you are feeling great about and you are going live.

Stop right there you are not ready yet!

I like to put a hold on going live for a few days. This let's me play around with the Shopify store and I also like to have someone else take a look, because something is not going to work the way you thought it was going to work or you will find spelling errors or picture don't load as expected.

Make sure you got everything working 100% before you go live.

If you are going to be paying for advertising make sure you don't lose money because something silly wasn't working.

Trust me I have been running ecommerce sites for a very long time and have had the unexpected happen only realizing it a few days after I spent money. That the traffic was not converting due to something I didn't notice.

Now that have gone over the site everything is ready and you tested and double checked. Now it's time to drive traffic to the your Shopify store.

You might be advertising on Facebook or Instagram and you need to pay attention to the analytics, because it really money you are spending. You need to make sure you are targeting the right audience and that if you are not seeing the right results you need to move fast to make changes.

Pause the campaign and fine tune it. It also pays to do as much research on how to advertise on the platform you want to use. Here is where YouTube is your friend, plenty of fine folks have shared best practices to run campaigns on Facebook or Instagram get that knowledge it's free.

Once you have the traffic coming to your store you need to pay attention to what keywords are working and demographics.

It's constant tweaking in the first week of launching a store.

If you aren't seeing sales convert maybe switch out the product photos or rewrite the verbiage or ad copy. You might want to add a few videos of the product in action or add some customer reviews.

When people get to your store you want to give them the best impression you can. People are pretty quick to click away. You also want make sure you have away of capturing emails. Maybe offer a discount code if you enter an email address.

Building an email list is going to help you grow your business.

You can always market to those people on your list even if they didn't make a purchase the first time they visited.

If you are not seeing results reevaluate the product maybe find another product that fits your niche.

With ecommerce it's all about testing tweaking and being patient. It will all come together, but you need to understand all the different aspects of running an ecommerce web site.

Over the years I keep testing making changes and fine-tuning. Sometimes it pays off and your shop starts making money other times you need to move on and get a new product and start over.